Yale’s Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill of Rutgers University recently received a $1.7 million grant from The Mellon Foundation to support the development of The Black Bibliography Project (BBP), an initiative that aims to revive and transform descriptive bibliography for African American and Black Diaspora literary studies.
Using “Linked Data” — a web-based technique for recording meaningful relationships between and among data drawn from disparate sources — and in conjunction with Wikibase, Goldsby and McGill are building an electronic database that will offer new pathways for understanding the history of Black-published books, magazines, and newspapers, and will help reveal the social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture, in the U.S. and across the Black Diaspora.